...For Every Athlete With One Surgery As The Climactic Moment

‘What is a worthwhile life?’

Kindly ready this, but also watch the 1 minute video for context to the words in today’s piece.

Hopefully they stand alone, as all words should… But these ones definitely need the visual to match, when and wherever possible.

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Who am I without the things I've made? 

If I am not posting footage of my Dear Daughters like I used to do as much- letters I wrote and saved for the better part of the last decade- now softly frozen for reasons for we to know alone... This is a life with forgotten beauty and foley catheters (sorry. It was alliterative)... But how many parents feel like their children aren't their purpose? 

If I am not posting glimpses of dancing in between these moments of just the last 3 years- the stage light specials that glitter where my body has none... What does my honest life actually look like? 

Is this who the world sees me to be?

(Not that I'd assume The World ever has time to sit and watch another from their park bench, as there are always far more beneficent of such honors)… But, is this who is witnessed when all the parts that make these parts worth enduring get removed? 

This is just 3 years of time.

Imagine a video of the last 10, then.

Imagine a video that's just this- the rips apart and the recoveries together- not including all the attacks and infections and complications we don't film... And ponder:

‘What is a worthwhile life?’

To me, it's the parts you don't see in this 1-minute amalgum... The parts I can't show you right now because they're extracted from the parts of me that need them... But for so many of us: This IS what most years actually clock to be. 

Imagine a video of the next 10. 

I have been thinking a lot about making a documentary purely for the sake of putting more representation into the world where we need it (for every athlete with one surgery as the climactic moment, there are too few humans in the world who show this recovery slog as an ongoing busk.)

So, maybe WE have to be that- For the next little bunhead who needs to see it. Even if we aren't the person that the person on the bench would watch and see and applaud... It doesn't mean there isn't a dance within these pieces of life that are a dance of their own, even without the dance of family and freedom? 

I see Celine's documentary of guts and gallons of humility and think, "I am not remotely her, but I see myself in the willingness to break for the thing that fills in gaps of my 'Am'. That connects me to people".

It wasn't the art or the stubbornness that stood out to me, when watching- It was how often she talked about people.

The people she created with and bonded with.

The people she didn't want to let down.

The person she became when she had to let them down. 

If you remove bricks from the wall that made the wall able to stand... No one needs to know how the life you 'see' here feels to know what happens next. 

(I wanted to use the term caulk in this so badly, but... Can anyone actually do so in a sentence and keep a straight face?) 

Does this peppered glimpse show enough to know a person?

No. It's not even enough, somehow, to truly know myself... Because, oddly enough, the architectonics that feel the most foundationally fundamental to my “self"“ is what isn’t seen here beyond a flash…. It comes from the parts now removed.

It comes from the people. 

I see myself in the willingness to break for the thing that fills in gaps of my 'Am'...

But I also wonder if this is who I've been all along. 

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